I’m pleased to announce that Storefront Echo has just been reduced to $40 on ThemeForest to make it more competitive with the other ecommerce themes there. So let’s see…by my count, you can now get Storefront Echo, another theme of your choice and the Storefront Insights plugin all for only $40! If you haven’t yet, head over to ThemeForest to pick it up today!

Also, we put out an update to the theme just yesterday. It is available for Echo customers from your Members’ Homepage on Storefront Themes. Changelog looks like this…

=1.4.0 = 3.01.12
*Fixed duplicate mobile search bars bug
*Fixed Add to Cart problem in WPEC for both variations and IE
*Removed duplicate call to fancy box script
*Removed duplicate BuddyNav js from fancycart
*Fixed missing price in woocommerce and jigoshop product pages
*Fixed margin error for images with IE8
*Fixed woocommerce filter by price widget

The past 24 hours has been a HUGE day for Storefront Themes!

Yesterday afternoon we went back to the place where started, ThemeForest to relaunch just one of our themes in a big way. Storefront Echo was originally released in November…it has performed very well, with over 200 current users and growing. However, I felt it could accomplish more…it was by far my favorite design that I’d put out because of the way it performs on mobile devices and I wanted to see what else it could accommodate…

I started out with BuddyPress…I really wanted to see if I could get BuddyPress to work, AJAX and all in a responsive design. Once that was done, I thought that the next step would be branching out to some other ecommerce platforms for the first time.

Now before I go on, I want to stress that we are not currently planning on making all our other themes compatible with other platforms. We’re still pretty loyal to Dan Milward and the WP eCommerce team. However, I see this as an opportunity to reach out to some new customers and a huge step toward establishing ourselves as the best resource for WordPress eCommerce on the planet.

So here it is…Storefront Echo is now compatible with WP e-Commerce, WooCommerce, JigoShop, BuddyPress and BBPress!

Best of all, it’s for sale right now on ThemeForest for only $45 which allows you to save $4 off our regular theme price. But that’s not all…

For a limited time, when you buy Storefront Echo on ThemeForest you get any one of our other themes absolutely free! How’s that for a deal? So what are you waiting for? Head on over to ThemeForest to get 2 awesome WordPress eCommerce themes for the price of 1!

New Design

Oh yeah, notice anything different at Storefront Themes? We’re currently redesigning the site from the ground up. This is ultimately to offer a better support platform but as it’s not really ready yet, for now you’ll have to be satisfied with just the new visuals. BUT, we’re working hard on making the support experience at Storefront Themes the best out there! Stay tuned to the blog for word on when it will be launched.

Now, let me get some sleep and I’ll get the videos up in the next couple of days!

The delay is basically because we couldn’t get a major piece of the music functionality to work as well as we wanted, but we’ve got it now and are finally on the home stretch. Hang in there because they’re coming!

So what’s new since this video? Well, of course the demo theme that we talked about in the talk is now one of our new themes, Storefront Echo. It has, of course been made Internet Explorer compatible and we’re thrilled with how it turned out. Enjoy the video and let us know what you think in the comments!

Having said that, we just couldn’t in good conscience promote this deal for a long time because we felt it was rewarding newer customers more than anyone…don’t get me wrong, we’re a business and need new customers to survive, but we are so appreciative of our existing members that we wanted to make sure that we looked after them as well. To that end, we have come up with an idea…if you’re already a Storefront Themes customer, you will automatically receive 15% off of our regular theme packages! All you need to do is login with your exisiting account info and then head to the purchase page…once you select your items, you will see a special member’s only price applied when you checkout on the next screen. It’s our way of saying thank you for supporting us. This is not a limited time offer! This price will be in place indefinitely.

Hope you all enjoy the new pricing! There’s a couple of great new themes that you can get while taking advantage of this offer!

So…let’s go over these 3 additions in better detail…

Storefront Echo

We first teased Storefront Echo at WordCamp SLC by giving out free beta copies to everyone at our talk and after a couple of months of development, we finally released it last week. This has been my favorite theme to work on so far because of the unique functionality we put into it…It’s completely responsive! No matter what screen you’re using, (desktop, laptop, ipad, mobile phone, etc) this theme adapts and looks fantastic! I’m particularly thrilled with how the theme operates on an iphone. Even the homepage slider and carousel are responsive and the carousel is even touch-enabled so you can swipe through the products using your finger!

Storefront Gridport

Gridport is another gorgeous design by George Ortiz (Designer, Instant, Edge) and once again, the visual aesthetics are very evident in his work. The homepage and products page grids are very minimal and show the product title and price when hovered over. Also, the grid has a nice animation when changing your browser width to snap each item into place. The blog has a unique way of laying out posts and a subtle little shopping cart icon triggers the cart to pop out onto the screen whenever it is clicked or when a product is added to the cart.

Mark Gason

Mark is a professional web designer, web developer, animator and print designer. He has a wealth of experience in flash and other things, but we caught him on our forums over the summer, answering in great detail nearly everyone’s questions there. We started talking with him and realized that we just had to have him with us so we hired him in October. Mark will be available on the forums for a few hours each day from Monday to Friday and will cover the bulk of all support requests.

So that’s it in a nutshell…er..a blog post. What’s next? Expect another blog post this week, but it will focus on some things behind the scenes. Till then, keep making some great shops!

Because that’s where the value is, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time working on Boutique the last couple of weeks and today, Boutique is now compatible with the latest version of BuddyPress, otherwise known as BuddyPress 1.5 (otherwise known as “Lombardi”)!

We’ve rewritten a lot of the template files so not only can you now take advantage of the new BuddyPress platform, but we’ve integrated all that fancy ajax goodness that you normally only get in a buddypress default child theme…only this is not child theme! It runs completely on its own as a standalone theme, bridging the gap between 2 of the most powerful WordPress plugins: BuddyPress and WP e-Commerce.

In addition to these changes, we’ve also increased the performance and compatability by making sure all our jquery and ajax files are being properly enqueued in our functions file in no-conflict mode.

So there you have it…Storefront Boutique may just be our most stable theme in spite of the plethora of technologies that it runs. You can check out the demo now, which is actually running 3 plugins…BuddyPress, WP e-Commerce and BuddyPress for WP e-Commerce-3.8 which allows you to display specific products in a BuddyPress group as a “Group Store”. See it here!

So that’s it! Existing customers can download the new update (version 1.2) from your members’ homepage. Now back to my cave where we’re coming up with some great new stuff!

Last week, immediately after raising your affiliate commission to 35%, we launched a new promotion with the best deal we’ve ever offered. However, over the weekend, it came to our attention that there may have been a problem with how we created the promotion that negatively affected affiliate sales…we finally confirmed this, found the problem and fixed it on Monday morning. The bad news is, that any sales of the promotion made during the week before that would not have received any affiliate commission.

We discovered a second error on Tuesday…some of our older affiliates were unaffected by the recent commission level increase and therefore were still at a 20% commission level. We have since raised everyone to the standard 35% level.

I am terribly sorry about all of this…the last people I’d want to hurt are the people helping to spread the word about us. Here’s what we’re going to do to fix it…effective immediately and for the next 30 days, we have raised your affiliate commission to 50%. We have also left the promotion up and will keep it up until next week. We also have a new theme that will launch VERY soon and it is our best ever. It is our hope that these promotions and the increase in your affiliate commission for the next 30 days will more than make up for any sales that you may have lost in the last week. Hopefully, we’ll all come out on top when all is said and done.

Thank you for being the very best community in the WordPress kingdom. We promise to do better for you.

Sincerely,

Matt Jones
Storefront Themes

Don’t fear however, as even if you aren’t one of the lucky ones to nab a tshirt, we have a special surprise for everyone attending our talk late in the day…stay tuned!

The title basically says it all! We spent August rewarding our current members with a special deal and now we’re launching a new promotion this month that just so happens to be our best deal ever! You can all 6 of our themes as well as our Insights plugin for only $75! This is obviously a great deal if you’re a new customer, but existing customers can benefit as well – If you already have a single, double, triple or even quad pack of our themes, you can complete your collection and still save as the $75 price tag is cheaper than the price of our Double Theme pack! Use the button below to access the promotion…

See Promotion Now »

We also just announced an increase in our affiliate commission, and we hope that they can take advantage of this sale as well! Enjoy!

And the Anniversary gifts just keep on coming! After celebrating our Anniversary this month by first rewarding our members, we’re about to launch our biggest promotion ever aimed at new customers when we realized that we haven’t got a gift for our proud affiliates yet! To that end, effective immediately, we are permanently raising our affiliate commission to 35% (up from 20%). That means that even for our lowest theme package, you would make over $17/sale!

Thanks for being such loyal supporters! Like I said, we have a brand new promotion that we’re about to launch in just a few minutes that should help you earn some more cash . Stay tuned!

Not convinced yet? Perhaps you’re heading to Utah for WordCamp and if so we suggest that you attend the session that we’re leading entitled “WordPress for eCommerce? The sky’s the limit!” Don’t worry, if you can’t attend, we’ll hopefully be recording and share it with you online. Hope to see you all later.

PS – We actually have a limited number of the tshirts so it’ll be first-come, first-serve, BUT we also have another extra special giveaway for conference attendees and we’ll be sure to bring enough for everyone.  Our lips are sealed about that one, so you’ll have to wait and see . Oh, and by the way, last call on the Storefront Themes Members-Only Birthday Sale! It ends at midnight MST tonight!

Why would you need to know how many visitors you get from a mobile device?

To put it simply, knowing this metric allows you to make better decisions when it comes to growing your online store. As more and more mobile devices make it easier for customers to shop your store from anywhere, you want to make sure they are having the best possible experience and ultimately making a purchase.

Here at Storefront Themes, we are making advancements to create more responsive themes that change layouts depending on screen sizes. Though, if you have a lot of mobile visitors, it may make sense to take this a bit urther and create a native app that your customers can download.

So how do you track mobile visitors?

The best way to track mobile visitors is through Google Analytics. I assume most of you are already using Google Analytics on your site, if not, you’re missing out on tons of valuable insights and information. I would recommend signing up if you’re not already using it.

Once you log in to your Google Analytics dashboard, you will see a tab on the left called “Visitors” which you can then click on and get more options. One of those options is called “Mobile” and offers analytics for mobile devices and mobile carriers accessing your site. Here is a screenshot showing just that:

Like I mentioned above, tracking this metric can be extremely useful when it comes time to make decisions surrounding mobile sites, mobile apps, and how you ultimately interact with your customers in this day of age.

Storefront Themes is committed to the task of making our themes more mobile friendly and arming our customers with the very best. If you have any questions, need further advice, or have feedback please let us know by leaving a comment below.

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All Themes Are Now 3.8 Compatible!

In case you missed it, we recently updated Storefront Designer to be compatible with the 3.8 version of WPEC. We know this has taken forever, and there have been a lot of reasons for it. I wanted to take a moment and share our priority list for what’s coming next so you can get a feel of where we’re at in our development. I’ve re-learned a lesson about no committing to release dates as it only makes people upset when you don’t hit it, so at least this way you might be able to get a feel for when stuff could/should be released…

1. Updating all of our videos to new versions of WordPress, WPEC and themes.
2. Update all themes for jQuery and WPML compatibility.
3. Produce a video tutorial for using WPML with our themes.
4. Update Storefront Designer and Storefront Instant with new features (new homepage options and page templates).

That’s as much as we’d like to share for now…there will be a new theme sneaking it’s way right in the middle of all of that simply because it’s development took far less time than we anticipated but for the most part, this will be our schedule for the next month. Here’s to even brighter days ahead!

Okay, let me quickly explain some things. First, sorry this has taken so long…Second, this isn’t our “Official” 3.8 version. Yes it works and it works well. However, we have been trying to release our newly updated themes with a bunch of new features for 3.8. Unfortunately, we had some problems making Designer compatible (not with WPEC but actually with WordPress 3.2!) and in the end, I made the decision to get out a version which is much the same as the original, only more stable and available for WPEC 3.8. We did the same thing with the Instant theme last month and I want to assure you that now that our themes are all 3.8 ready, we will be making both of those themes even more spectacular, starting with Designer.

So, while you’re enjoying the new Designer theme finally with WPEC 3.8 compatibility, rest assured that we will very shortly release the newer version with gridview, unified search and by popular demand, a new slider option.

For now, let me get back to our support forums where I’m sure many are waiting patiently!

Customer validation is the act of validating that your product(s) are valuable to your customers. It’s really simple and yet so many of us waste time and money every day by thinking that if we sell it, people will buy it.

So how do you get started with customer validation? Here are a few steps you can take:

1. Create a Survey. Surveys are great and it’s never been easier to get them in front of your customers. You can run surveys on your blog, your Facebook page, or even use online survey services such as SurveyMonkey. The goal should be simple. Find out if what your selling is of any value and if you’re selling the right product. Ask questions such as “How much would you pay for product X” or “What do you use more, product X or product Y”. You want to make the questions simple and straight forward.

2. Talk to People. First rule about this step is not to talk to your friends or family. Talk to people you don’t know and that won’t have a hard time disagreeing with you. Ask them if they would buy your product(s) and how much they would pay. Also, and this is a big one, ask them what they want or need that they can’t currently get. If you can solve a need or want in their life, then you’ve already won the battle.

3. Start Tracking. If you haven’t started already, start tracking everything! From site analytics to buying behaviors. You can’t change something you don’t measure. Tracking visits to your site, what people are looking at, and what people are buying will tell you tons about what your customers find valuable. This will help you make better decisions on what to sell and who to sell it to.

4. Learn and Adapt. Customer validation allows you to learn and adapt faster to your customers. By asking the tough questions early on, you can avoid wasting time selling the wrong products to the wrong people. To effectively do this, you have to be willing to learn and adapt your store. Often, this can be difficult as many of us become emotionally attached to our products and find it hard to change.

Customer validation is huge when launching a store. It reduces the amount of wasted time and money by learning everything up front and getting validation from your customers that what you are selling is valuable.